(The following is an excerpt of an article from our sister publication Esquire.com, regarding FBI Director James Comey and his decision to release details of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.)

In November, I put a question to Comey through the FBI's chain of command: Why did he feel obliged to tell Congress about the cache of unopened emails at the end of October, before his agents had a warrant to look at them? Comey declined to respond directly, but an FBI official familiar with his thinking explained the gist of the dilemma: The director stood at the fork of two bad roads. Route one: Comey sends the letter to Capitol Hill. A congressman hell-bent on harming Hillary Clinton leaks it. The evidence reveals no crime. Clinton is defeated. Route two: Comey doesn't send the letter. The existence of the emails leaks. Comey is doomed. Another official who works closely with the director put the conundrum in a pithy phrase: "Jim Comey thinks he was handed a s--t sandwich."

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I also called Ali Soufan, the former FBI supervisory special agent who blew the whistle on the Bush administration's practice of torturing suspected terrorists in secret prisons. He's a highly regarded security-intelligence consultant, and he stays posted on what happens at the highest echelons of the FBI. Soufan told me that he believes Comey was right to go to Congress with what he'd learned. "He had to tell them what happened. But I don't think he paid a lot of attention as to how his statement would be interpreted politically."